But it’s I can’t have it now stuff, can’t afford it stuff. It’s also won’t work here stuff, not the right time stuff.

It is easy to be swept away with new ideas. Easy to be despondent because you can’t do it all, have it all, today, tomorrow, right now. But you don’t need it all. Because at the heart of it, all you need is good people stuff. Little things, small changes, taking just one step. Improving what you do in your organisation, for your organisation, every day. The smallest HR team, the smallest HR budget, can still make a massive difference, even if you can’t do the big and fancy, new and shiny, everything the others do.

On a serious note, your blog is making me think, in fact I’ve thought this for a while now, there may be a whole heap of brilliant theory and process and ‘stuff’ that HR can/is supposed to do, but actually if we just paid careful attention to some of the small personal interactions, the tiny ways of working with and for each other, if we did the things that really don’t need a policy or a procedure but are about human dignity and respect and understanding and appreciation…if we did some of that stuff better, got a better connection with the people in the organisation, really listened…I mean really, really listened, then maybe we wouldn’t need the big fancy shiny new stuff? We wouldn’t need a sledge hammer to crack a nut (awkward seasonal reference!), good work would just happen, good teams would evolve and …….well I’m seeing Utopia on the horizon…I think things can be a lot simpler than they are right now.

Thanks for writing that, I feel pretty passionately about small stuff :0)

I’m passionate about small stuff too, especially when it comes to leadership. A little thank you, making time for someone, remembering a birthday. You can read all the fancy leadership courses you like, but these are the things that people remember and appreciate. Not how cool the strategy was! Blog coming up on this soon….

Necessity is the mother of invention; and forces me to think about how to try things that I can’t afford or have capacity to do. It creates a culture where I wouldn’t want to do what everyone else does.

Someone recently said that I was ahead of the curve so much the curve couldn’t see me. Good. Being an outlier is cool.